


Next time, we'll be together forever

by milklaren



Category: Formula 1 RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Brief character death, Drama & Romance, M/M, Mentions of Cancer, Mentions of Striptease, Mentions of Violence, Reincarnation, Romance, Soulmate Reincarnation, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:15:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21926560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/milklaren/pseuds/milklaren
Summary: They are destined to meet three times in three different lives, and each time one or the other perishes, leaving the other aching in sorrow, not even knowing why.If only both of them could remember their previous reincarnations, and accept each other newly, as the other's half.
Relationships: Daniel Ricciardo/Max Verstappen
Comments: 2
Kudos: 50
Collections: Motorsport Secret Santa 2019





	Next time, we'll be together forever

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bonotje](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bonotje/gifts).



> So, hi there! :D
> 
> I hope that you enjoy this little fic, I honestly was very nervous when I got you as my addressee because your writing is so good and I had to match that!
> 
> But I am very happy with how it turned out, and I hope it makes you happy too :)
> 
> Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a very magical New Year!

It’s almost 2am on the clock, and Daniel huffs, suddenly aware of his surroundings that consisted, as usual, of a large king-size bed in a hotel room, booked by the team. He doesn’t open his eyes, not willing to let go of the sweet sleep slumber that was still clouding his mind. The dark-haired man turned onto his side, furrowing eyebrows. His head felt like it was bashed on by hundreds of hammers, sending painful spasms throughout his entire body. _“Am never drinking, ever again,”_ thinks the racing driver, further hiding his face in the pillow in the hopes that it will somehow help with falling asleep.

Somehow, it does, and in a couple of minutes Daniel feels himself drowsy again, not being even slightly bothered by the movement of someone’s legs next to his own under the duvet.

__

_Standing on the verge of the sea water, the man reeled his last catch of the day in, silver and pink trouts flapping about the net viciously, anxious to try and break free from their disasterous fate. He knew that he just needed to get this lot to the cart that was waiting beside his hut, load it on and watch one of the royal guards take it away, all of his day’s hard work disappearing to be devoured by people who didn’t the price of hard labour and never worked for anything in their lives._

_None of them ever needed to be a fisherman, living on the forgotten outskirts of the kingdom and praying to the sea gods that the fish, nesting in these waters, never goes away, taking your only source of survival with it._

_Making it to the top of the hill, he removed his unruly curls from his forehead with a swift movement of his palm and lifted the net onto the readied wooden cart, emptying its contents into it. The trout has visibly calmed, now only small fishes could be seen flailing their fins from time to time, gasping for water._

_“Don’t tell me it’s trout again?” suddenly came a familiar cheeky voice from behind the cart. The curly-haired man turned, a small smirk dashing on his face._

_“And hello to you too, Maximillian,” greeted the dark-skinned man, wiping his cheek on a sleeve of his long, drably sweater._

_Maximillian – or Max, as he called him in his head – was a peculiar man. The royal guards were usually brutal-looking, scruffy, all in all non-attractive men without any side of emotion or brain activity. Max, on the other hand, was shot but muscularly built, with honey-blond hair and bright eyes and a soft smile that made him look more like a boy than a grown man._

_“If you can get me another sea here with another type of fish – I’ll happily oblige to providing something other than trout. In any case – it’s not like you’ll get to eat any of it, won’t you?” Teasingly asked the fisherman, strapping the net to the cart with ropes and, having done that, walking up to stand face-to-face with the guard._

_Max chuckled, and the light sound of his laugh travelled through the wind, echoing in his ears. The fisherman’s eye lingered across the young man’s face, taking in the sight of the wrinkles around his eyes, the mop of unruly hair that kept falling onto his brows, the birthmark hiding on his upper lip._

_Letting out a hum, Max said, “I’d better take that up to the castle, before they have my head in for delaying His Majesty’s supper.”_

_Realizing that he was straight up staring at the guard all this time, the fisherman coughed awkwardly and took a step back._

_“Yes, of course.”_

_Maximillian strapped his horse into the cart’s shafts and jumped onto its back, taking the reins. Turning back, the guard looked back at the worker before him._

_“I’ll see you tomorrow here, same time?”_

_The sentence sounded almost like an invitation to an inappropriately intimate meeting._

_“Sure, it’s not like I’m going anywhere,” replied the fisherman with a forcedly careless smile. Max smiled in return._

_“Good! Frankly, I’d be disappointed to not find you here one day.”_

_With that, he turned his horse and started his way back up the hill, towards the main city. The remaining man watched as Max’s figure became smaller, and smaller, until it completely disappeared into the forestry line on the horizon._

_The fisherman sighed, and walked back to his small hut, nevertheless thinking of the blond man and his boyish smile. He thought briefly that he better ask what the younger man meant by all this, but that can wait until tomorrow, surely._

_None of them are going anywhere._

_That’s until he wakes up the next day and learns that a mob of bandits assaulted a royal guard that midnight, hoping to steal some shimmering gold but instead being stuck with smelly fish and a body that needed disposing of…_

__

The headaches get only worse, however not bad enough to wake him up completely, and Daniel just twists and turns in his place, almost trapping himself in his own duvet. His forehead is burning and there is an expression of confusion and anger, and some sorrow on his face. Eyebrows twisted, he kicks off the blanket completely, suddenly finding the atmosphere too blazingly hot for his liking. Daniel’s mind slips back into incoherent dream, while someone’s arm curls around his naked torso.

__

 _He’d never had thought that someday he’ll be calling dark, alluring streets of London his workplace. Well, technically his work was not done on the streets but in the underground club, where air consisted of pipe smoke and alcohol fumes and incoherent rich men were getting lap dances left and right, because none of them could keep their dicks in place for even five minutes._

_However, the world was recovering from war and loss, so people needed all ‘entertainment’ they could get, even if it was not all legal. Nonetheless, it was embarrassing, and it was disgusting, but it was also paying rent in the obnoxiously tiny room he was renting off on the attic of some old shabby house, so he bit his tongue and always tried to pour his anger into his performances. To his luck, dark-skinned, tattooed guys seemed to be a prime attraction this season, so he never complained about lack of dollar bills in his thong._

_On that particular night, he just about finished his normal routine, letting some drunk worker drool at his ass for a crumpled piece of paper, when suddenly lights went on in the club and a group of military-dressed men marched in, taking hold of anyone who tried to escape the scene._

_“Nobody move, everyone in here is now being arrested for prostitution and public disturbance!”_

_A mid-night police raid is never a joke, he could easily get a serious sentence for jiggling his ass publicly, and the place he’d serve it at would not only break his bones, but spirit too._

_He knows the drill: sprint to the changing room, grab any clothes you can put on in less than 10 seconds, do so, then try to escape via stage door, praying that the bobbies did not yet have time to stake someone there._

_Only his luck runs out when he bolts through the corridor while hastily putting on somebody’s woolen pants and a sweater of questionable freshness. As he turns the corner, he comes nose-to-nose with a young blonde man with neatly brushed hair and wide lips. He hopes that maybe it’s someone from the club, but the man’s uniform tells him just how fucked up his life is about to become._

_The badge shines briefly in the dim lightning of the ceiling lamp, and he notices a part of the surname engraved on it._

_-stappen._

_“Identify yourself,” demands the officer in light-sounding but stern voice, reaching for the gun at his hip._

_“Jenson Button, carpenter,” the words come out of his mouth before he even thinks the question through._

_“Yeah, good try,” quickly replies the bobby, apparently somehow knowing that the dancer was lying. “Your fame here precedes you, I’m afraid. Should maybe have asked the owner to remove all the posters of your buttocks and your name written underneath them before trying to give me a false name, mister R-“_

_He stopped, one of his palms now enclosed around the other man’s wrist. The initial contact was as good as normal, however in the very next second the bodies of both men were engulfed in a powerful jolt of energy, as if a light of hundreds of stars went through them at once. Their wrists felt blazing hot, almost unbearable to endure, but before either could react at such otherworldly experience, a shot rang through the air, shattering the moment._

_For the first two seconds neither understood what has happened, until the dark-skinned man – still having only one sleeve of the sweater put on properly – slowly fell onto his knees and then the side, a fast-growing patch of red appearing on his back._

_Another police officer entered the corridor and, thinking that his comrade is being attacked by one of the arrestees, decided to act in the most brutal way._

_Weirdly, it didn’t even hurt, he only felt a mild pang of discomfort before everything before his eyes started turning blurry, and the last thing he remembered was the blonde officer’s face with those striking blue eyes that were full of fury and, surprisingly, pain._

__

This time when he comes to, he finds himself wrapped under a duvet again, lying on his side in a crooked way and feeling a weird painful feeling in his shoulders. He doesn’t get much time before he is out again, the fever taking over and only allowing him to hear the faint echoes of someone calling out his name. Someone painfully familiar, with unruly hair, and bright eyes, and a birthmark…

__

_He never believed in this crap about rebirthing and multiple lives, but if he did, he thought, his soul would surely be the most unlucky, pitiful one in the whole fucking universe. Lying in the hospital bed, he looked down on his tattooed arms, so thin now, almost paper-like. The rhythmic beeping sound of the heart rate monitor – he noticed it has slowed down considerably in the last weeks – bore him out of his mind and served almost as a countdown to the inevitable._

_He knew he is going to die soon. He only hoped that maybe he is lucky enough for it to be today._

_A knock on the door, and then it opens to reveal a male nurse in white scrubs that, in his professional patient opinion, did not suit his light hair colour. Nevertheless, he smiled warmly when the young man approached his bedside._

_“Hi,” he greeted softly, his voice raspy from sleep and weakening muscles._

_“Hi,” replied the young doctor slowly, taking a seat and grasping the tattooed palm of the bedridden man. “How are you feeling?”_

_“Are we really going to do this every single day?” he asked almost tiredly, pushing all of his effort to lightly tug onto the other man’s fingers. His visitor sighed shakily and looked in the chocolate eyes before him, trying very hard not to let the brims of his own ones water with tears._

_“Aren’t you on duty tonight?” whispered the patient._

_“N-no,” replied the nurse. “They let me go for tonight, so I could…”_

_A silence followed. No words were said but both men understood. The ill man then sighed with relief. His pains and misery will finally be over. However, that also meant that he will be breaking the heart of the one person he’s grown to love most in his whole life._

_“I’m just happy it will happen today and here, and that you will be there to send me off.”_

_The younger man swallowed a sob and reached out to put his free palm onto his lover’s cheek._

_“Of course. I’ll be here all the time, to make sure you rest well. Now try to have a little bit of sleep, my love, it will help.” With that, he reached out and, visibly shaking, planted a soft kiss onto the ill man’s forehead._

_The dark-skinned man hummed, watching his lover sit back into the chair. With the last strength that his body possessed, he concentrated on the young man’s face, wanting it to be the last thing he remembers before his slumber: he wanted to forever remember the disheveled, dirty blond hair that always tickled his brows when they kissed; the plump cheeks that he loved to tease the other man over, pinching them lovingly; of course, the shiny sapphire eyes that carried the weight of the world and all the love it had._

_Slowly departing, the man thinks that somehow, he’s seen this face somewhere else already… Only with lots of dark blue around it… and weird noises, like a mechanical whirling…_

__

Jolting awake, Daniel’s first instinct is to scream, or kick someone, or just jump off the bed and run as far as he can before the adrenalin that is coursing through his veins right now wears off.

It’s still night outside, it takes the Australian a couple of seconds to adjust to the murky darkness of the room and to recollect his thoughts.

He seemed to be having lots of weird dreams, separated by episodes of fever and hallucinations. At least the race weekend was over and now he could at least make an excuse for disappearing from the land of the living for a couple of days and locking himself up in his hotel suite.

Turning to his left, Daniel is met with a peaceful vision that instantly calms his heart: the other side of the bed is taken up by a young Dutchman who is lying on his stomach and is softly snoring, face half-hidden in the pillow.

Daniel smiles involuntary, reaching out to stroke Max’s forehead and to put in place a strand of dirty blonde hair that was covering his eye.

The contact sends a powerful energy shock through his arm right to his chest and suddenly, he _remembers._

The royal guard and the cart of trout.

The police officer and stinky sweater.

The heartbroken nurse and his own excruciating pain for leaving him, yet _again_.

Daniel gasps a lungful of air and softly drops his arm onto the mattress. Though usually a deep sleeper, such commotion seems to awaken Max, and the younger man, muttering something under his nose, opens one eye.

“Oh, you are feeling better, that’s good, I was worried you might have caught a fe-“

“I remember,” Daniel interrupts him with an agitated expression. Max furrows his brows, now fully awake.

“You… what?”

“I remember _you,”_ repeats Dan, intensely looking into Max’s eyes, trying to find a glimpse of recognition and acknowledgement of the fact that the Australian has not completely lost his marbles.

It takes Max a second to understand what the older man means, but then his face lights up, and his eyes start filling up with tears, and in the next second he throws himself against Daniel’s chest, burrowing his face in his neck.

 _“Took you long enough asshole,”_ whispers the Red Bull driver, clutching at Daniel’s torso. “I was starting to get worried it will take you another wasted life to finally remember.”

Daniel bursts out laughing and hold Max close, as close as it is physically possible without choking him.

Cradled in his arms was his everything: his friend, his lover, his fate, his soulmate. And even if it did take him three long, painfully futile lives to finally be able to hold him close and love him fully, it all seemed unimportant now, somehow. Because Max was worth a billion lives and deaths, and Daniel would be ready to live and perish through all of them, just for _him._

**Author's Note:**

> idea was inspired by scarlet47’s comic ‘Soulmates’ from tumblr


End file.
